Bloodletting
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This Jar Once Held Living Medicine | Object Histories
This ceramic jar once held some of the most valuable creatures in medicine. For two thousand years, doctors believed that bleeding a patient could cure almost anything, and leeches were the preferred tool for it, right up until French pharmacies were importing forty million of them in a single year. This is the strange, occasionally…
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Doctors Cured You By Draining Your Blood | Object Histories
For roughly two thousand years, if you got sick almost anywhere in the Western world, a doctor’s first move was to cut you open and drain your blood into a bowl like this one. From ancient Greek humoral theory to the death of George Washington, this is the full story of bloodletting: the tools, the…